Kristine Phillips

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Washington: Hillary Clinton was nowhere near Washington the day charges against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman were announced and news broke that a former Trump campaign volunteer had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about meeting with Russian officials.

She was in Chicago where she promoted her book ("I have a great chapter about Russia"), thought about her Halloween costume ("I think I will maybe come as the president"), and quipped about conservative media outlets' preoccupation on a vanquished presidential candidate while big news surrounded the one who won.

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"All the networks except Fox are reporting what's really going on . . . It appears they don't know I'm not president," tweeted NBC News politics reporter Alex Seitz-Wald, who was at a Clinton event at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University Monday night.

Conservative media outlets seem to have largely followed White House talking points in reporting the news dump of the past few days: There's no collusion. The charges against Paul Manafort predates his involvement in the Trump campaign. George Papadopoulos was a lowly campaign volunteer. And the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee's funding of research that resulted in the now-infamous dossier - not to mention the Uranium One deal with a Russian company that was approved during the Obama administration while Clinton was secretary of state - are the clearest evidence of collusion with Russia.

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For the Clinton camp, it seems there's a fixation on an administration that does not exist.

"If you watch Fox News these days, they're treating Hillary Clinton as if she won the election," said former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, calling the media outlet the White House's "propaganda arm" that focuses on Clinton while downplaying the recent criminal allegations arising from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian influence in the presidential election.

"Fox News is certainly buying that alternative narrative and they're trying to peddle it, but Bob Mueller is not going to fall for that."

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Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not president of the United States: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Photo: AP

The media outlet also had aired segments that included references to the nonexistent "Clinton administration" and "President Clinton."

"The speculation is so insane right now. What we should be focusing on are the continued lies of the Clinton administration, the continued fallacies that they perpetuate," former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends" Saturday, as news of an indictment loomed over Washington.

The Clinton coverage continued to dominate in the conservative media world Monday morning, even as news broke that Manafort and his former business associate, Rick Gates, were told to surrender to the FBI. White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway appeared on "Fox & Friends," saying the focus should be on Clinton.

"People should be looking into any coordination . . . between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, the Russian dossier," Conway said, adding that she and others in the administration would love to not talk about Clinton, "but she just won't go away."

"Fox & Friends" echoed Conway a bit later that morning with the headline, "PROBE SHOWS DEM TIES TO URANIUM DEAL, DOSSIER," as other national media outlets focused their coverage on Manafort.

News of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee's role in funding research that led to the dossier, first reported by The Washington Post last week, has become a major weapon for the White House and conservative media, which sought to focus allegations of collusion on Clinton, her campaign and the Democrats.

"There is clear evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding to smear the president and influence the election," White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during the White House briefing Monday.

So has the Uranium One deal that's now the subject of a congressional probe.

Fallon, the former Clinton campaign spokesman, dismissed the new investigation as an effort by congressional Republicans to try to "dig up scandals" on someone who's never going to seek elected office again.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Clinton was "paid a fortune" when she was secretary of state in exchange for a deal with a Russian state-owned nuclear energy company to control over 20 percent of the US uranium supply. But multiple fact checks have shown that there is no evidence that Clinton was personally involved in the deal, which was approved by the Nuclear Energy Commission and the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, none of which involved Clinton.

As The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler wrote: "Any suggestion that Russian money was directed to influence Clinton's decisions would be explosive. But the fatal flaw in this allegation is Hillary Clinton, by all accounts, did not participate in any discussions regarding the Uranium One sale which - as we noted - does not actually result in the removal of uranium in the United States."

By the Monday evening broadcast, the cable news headlines remained just as disparate:

By Monday evening the New York Post - which, along with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, is also owned by Rupert Murdoch - had nearly dropped the story of the indictments from its homepage, focusing instead on sexual harassment scandals related to Kevin Spacey, Peyton Manning and Harvey Weinstein.

Breitbart's lead story was about Tony Podesta, a prominent Democratic lobbyist and brother of Hillary Clinton's campaign chief.

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